CineXL

CineXL details

Presentation

CineXL was a weekly show directed to cinema-goers.
It featured trailers, interviews, previews and reviews. It was all done in a voiced over manner, much like a radio show.
It ran from 2001 to 2006 on the cable channel SIC Radical.

Development

Design
The idea was great but the execution was complicated: to get hundreds of premiere invitations laid out in a cork board and as the camera panned around it would stop and focus on one or more and they would spring to life with a small famous clip of the actual movie.
Marco Oliveira, the show producer and me gathered about 100 movie premiere invitations. They were all digitized and prepared to be used as a 3D texture. I also had a good collection of movie tickets (the old stylish ones, not the crappy current ones) so these were also digitized to be used and placed around the invitations. Finally Marco made a list of the order and importance of which should the camera focus on. These were the ones that were animated while the rest remained static.

Motion
By 2001 most motion design revolved around clean and shiny good looking 3D. But movies are (or were) made with reall film, which has dirt, grain and noise. So I decided that the only way to go was to get a rough dirty look full of scratches and noise. The only way to do that was to get actual film onto the title sequence. So I set up a room with an 8mm projector with old film that I could use and a digital video camera aligned with the screen. I spent an entire day scratching, burning and destroying small bits of old 8mm film to get the effects I needed.

Finally the yellow color and the green hues played an inportant role in the style of CineXL. With the amount of invitations and tickets ascending to the hundreds, the amount of diferent colors on screen every second would have been too much.

First 3D render test

Software

Photoshop 4.0
3DMax 2.5
Combustion 1.0

Hardware

Curiosities

The motion design was made before the program actually existed. The pilot was a gamble made by Sigma3 to capture the attention of film distributors in Portugal and sponsors. It worked.
There is a very special made-up premiere invitation that does not belong with the rest. It is around the 12 second mark.